music cart programming

[X5-655]

I want to make a cartridge as a joke for a friend.. The cartridge will have all songs from a real bands album (green day), except one twist, being played on the Atari 2600 using it's own noise generators (would mostly be following lead guitars and vocals, that's about it), and will say the name and song on the TV screen..

 

How hard would this be (is this even possible?), and approximately, how big of a ROM chip would I even need? No special fancy graphics, just white text on a black background, that's it...

 

I want to learn Atari programming, and this would be a fun start for me...

 

From what I hear, the Atari 2600 is limited in range for notes, if this true, how small is this range?

[A.J. Franzman]

It's not that the 2600's two "voices" are particularly limited in range, it's that the frequencies they can produce don't correspond to any musical scale (Western octaves or otherwise).

[supercat]

It's not that the 2600's two "voices" are particularly limited in range, it's that the frequencies they can produce don't correspond to any musical scale (Western octaves or otherwise).

 

If you don't need much in the way of graphics, the 2600 can produce polyphonic music with any desired pitches. A demonstration of the required technique may be found in the MiniDig. Alternatively, if you just wanted to store digitized audio, a 32K cart could hold about 4 seconds of the highest quality audio the Atari could produce or 8 or 12 seconds of reduced-but-still-decent quality. Not a whole lot, but perhaps enough for your purposes.

[X5-655]

It's not that the 2600's two "voices" are particularly limited in range, it's that the frequencies they can produce don't correspond to any musical scale (Western octaves or otherwise).

 

If you don't need much in the way of graphics, the 2600 can produce polyphonic music with any desired pitches. A demonstration of the required technique may be found in the MiniDig. Alternatively, if you just wanted to store digitized audio, a 32K cart could hold about 4 seconds of the highest quality audio the Atari could produce or 8 or 12 seconds of reduced-but-still-decent quality. Not a whole lot, but perhaps enough for your purposes.

I don't want any samples.. or if i did, it would be purely percussions, and only short clips, while the Atari still played the notes itself...